Friday, 27 December 2013

Eleven Answers, and then one.

Bloggers involved in the racket known as ELT
(English Language Teaching) are answering eleven questions
and then nominating eleven other people to do the same. I have been reading
the answers of the Secret DOS (Director of Studies). I haven’t been
invited to play, but I’m nicking the questions anyway, and adding one. I won’t
nominate anybody else to respond to the questions, but any commenters are
invited to choose one or two, should they so wish.

1. Why did you begin blogging?

I had a ‘sent items’ box full of a
decade’s worth of ELT-related moans, in-jokes and parodies, and thought they
might conceivably entertain a wider audience than the original recipients. However,
I soon found that I’m no longer sufficiently interested in ELT to blog about it
to the exclusion of my other peeves and obsessions.

2. What keeps you teaching every year?

Back in the nineties in Athens,
my job was exclusively teacher training and I loved it. I can only understand theories
if I can see a practical application for them, and conducting seminars,
observing hundreds of lessons and midwifing trainees’ research projects taught me much more about the theoretical background to ELT than it did the trainees
themselves. For nine years at the centre where I worked I felt engaged, useful and
appreciated. The cat and I lived hand-to-mouth in some pretty grotty places, but
fuck it, this was the cutting-edge of the Bohemian experience, living entirely for my art while absorbing a foreign culture! Since leaving Greece, what keeps me teaching is
nothing more than the need to pay the bills and keep body and soul together - and
the realisation that it's too late to do anything else.

3. What is an aspect of teaching that you struggle with and have tried
to improve on?

Standing up in front of a group of people
and being presenter, director, producer,diagnostician and counselor is not especially easy for somebody as moody
and introverted as I am, and I have to deal with frequent stage-fright and a
rather annoying feeling that I’m playing a character rather than being myself.
So I have to work on being myself. It smacks a bit of new-agey woo-woo, but
doing this involves breathing deeply, relaxing my stomach muscles and
remembering my brief training in the Alexander technique from years ago. I have to make a conscious effort to dissolve the mental barrier I unconsciously set up between myself and the students. I also
usually have to rearrange the classroom furniture so that there is no teacher’s
desk between us.

4. What is your ideal lesson like?

Well, first off, there must be nobody who’s under eighteen years old,
and at least one specimen of male eye-candy. Once these two requirements are
satisfied, we need a group of people who are present by choice, who get on well
together and who have understood that they need to participate and not just sit
there in respectful silence, even if that is what’s expected of them in their
own culture. The students’ own input will then provide much of the material for
the lesson, so that it is not just a dispiriting plod through a unit of a
coursebook.

5. What would you hope your students remember you for?

My wit, charm, good looks and modesty.

6. Why did you become a teacher of ESOL?

Yeah, why the fuck did I… I drifted into
it at 22, heedlessly, as people say they drift into drugs and prostitution. Anyway,
by the time I was 27 and had done a year-long diploma course, ELT had provided
me with a full time job and restored some of the academic self-confidence
that Cambridge had knocked out of me, contrary to its supposed aim. I wonder if
I might otherwise indeed have drifted into prostitution. Now, there’s a thought; I’d
probably be a lot better off.

7. If you were given a paid semester off to do whatever you wanted,
what would you do?

If I’m honest, I’d probably just lie here
faffing about online until I developed pressure sores. Thank God there’s no
chance of my being given a paid semester to goof off.

8. Do you listen to music while grading? If so, what do you listen to?
If not, why not?

I can’t ignore music: I’m either
transported or irritated, so no, I don’t listen to anything while marking. I bung
wax plugs in my ears and plough on.

9. Who has influenced your teaching?

You can pick up all sorts of tips and
ideas from books and colleagues, but really the only people who’ve influenced
what I do in class are the trainees I’ve observed, the students I teach, and
myself. I have made a lot of mistakes in my time in the classroom and
reflecting on your fuck-ups is the best way to improve.

10. If you could go anywhere in the world to teach, where would that be
and why?

Here the secret DOS and I are of one mind:
‘my sitting room’. Except I wouldn’t teach: I’d write, or at least edit. No stage
fright involved in turning on your lap top. Bliss.

I don’t have one. Again, I agree entirely
with the Secret DOS: ‘It’s trite but my favourite resources are 1) my sense of
humour and 2) the students I am working with.’ None of my students is aware of my
answer to question 3.

Bonus question

12. Do you have a pet peeve? If so, what is it? If not, have you ever
had one, and how did you get over it?

I have a whole petting zoo of peeves.
Here are three, a skimming of the surface:

a) Students who chew gum,b) students who don’t use deodorant, c) students who hawk back snot instead of
blowing their noses.

These are all culture based. Lots of
students chew gum after lunch to sweeten the breath, but I do wish they’d do it
quietly. Eating noisily is taken as a sign of enjoyment in some cultures, but the
squelchy sound of open-mouthed gum-chewing doesn’t merely irritate me, it
enrages me.

Some (sub) cultures don’t mind B.O.,
others have a horror of it. I belong to the latter category. I followed a
colleague down a corridor the other week as he was waving his arms as though to
disperse smoke and gasping ‘fuckinelle!’ He and I had just endured four hours
of the acridity of male sweat and cigarette breath from a group of a
nationality I shall not disclose.

In Japan and some South American
countries, blowing your nose in public is considered disgusting, and the sight of a teacher blowing his nose in class is quite as shocking as if he were
spitting on the carpet or tearing off farts. Now, after ten weeks of the
porcine honking and snorting of a Brazilian lad with chronic catarrh, I feel
that I probably have no unexpurgated karma.

5 comments:

Thanks for opportunity to speak about ME. Interesting answers from you. I now have the chance to really think about this fringe profession we cling to. What is it and why do we keep doing it? Money. But if we didn't have it, how else would we earn money? Answers on a postcard…..

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Quite.

''When the Washington Post telephoned me on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, I felt at once that this was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual and the defence of free expression''

"Nothing optional - from homosexuality to adultery - is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate."

''The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.'

Christopher Hitchens

“It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvellous universe, this tremendous﻿ range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.”

Richard P. Feynman

''Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours. "Introverts," writes a perceptive fellow named Thomas P. Crouser, "are driven to distraction by the semi-internal dialogue extroverts tend to conduct. Introverts don't outwardly complain, instead roll their eyes and silently curse the darkness." Just so.''

Jonathan Rauch

''One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallendown a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn't know about.''

Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

''The human species, Dinah sometimes thinks, is stark staring mad. People have no sooner got themselves born than they start to imagine the gods want them to flatten their heads, or perforate their genitals, or arrange themselves into hierarchies based on the colour of their skins. The gods require them to avoid eating hoofs, or to walk backwards in certain sacred presences, or to hang up cats in clay pots and light fires underneath them. The gods like them to slaughter birds and make incisions in their own skulls. The gods have put the banana on this earth so that the human species can apprehend that fruit as a miraculous revelation of the Holy Trinity. It has to do with their singular ability to think and dream in symbols. This is what makes the species so vicious. It's also what makes them great poets.''

Barbara Trapido'Frankie and Stankie'.

On God

Sick of it, whatever it's called, sick of the names.I dedicate every pore to what's here.

Ikkyu1394-1481

on trying not to be an arse

On Buddhist meditation:

'Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether.'